Hundred Foot Journey Extra Credit

This weekend I watched the Hundred Foot Journey and found a couple of instances where I could relate what we have learned in Art History to in terms of architecture. The film was about an Indian family who moved to the French countryside to open up a restaurant. It was interesting to see the juxtaposition in architectural styles between the French and Indian cultures. When the Indian family moved to France, they bought a building to turn into a restaurant. When they were fixing it up, they added a giant temple looking facade to the exterior of their very traditional building. The film followed two competing restaurants which were situated right across from each other with a road dividing them. As you can see from the attached picture, the two buildings look as if they are of the same style, very traditional rectangular shape with simple decorations on the windows and molding. This movie does a nice job of showing how the two cultures can differ from each other and it shows a physical barrier, the road, as well. The road signifies a divide between the competing cultures; French and Indian.

This first building held the French restaurant shown in the movie. As you can see, it has a very rectangular shape and is very geometrical. There are few curved or soft lines other than the arches on the tops of the windows. There are a lot of windows in the restaurant which shows that the architect wanted to make sure a lot of light could flow into the rooms, illuminating the restaurant. The only other decorations on this restaurant are the unsaturated colors used to paint the restaurant; a light pink wall and pale blue window trimmings. From the first image of the two buildings facing each other across the road, they appear to be very similar. However, once the Indian family purchased the building to turn into a restaurant, they added their own decoration which is characteristic of an Indian style of architecture.

This was the best image I could find of the decorations that were applied to the facade of the traditionally French building. As you can see, the family added a huge temple-like decoration to the outside of the brick and stone building. You can see the differing styles in terms of the curvature of the central dome and the two smaller domes flanking it. The architecture of the temple facade shows a movement upward, signifying a closeness with the gods or a desire to resemble a mountain to be closer to the gods. Furthermore, you can see how much more colorful the temple facade decoration is than the original architecture of the building. There are gold and blue decorations, most likely lapis lazuli and god. This would signify wealth and status in this culture. Lastly, on the temple facade, there are a lot more geometrical decorations and patterns all along the front. This is different from the original architecture that was covered up which was very simplistic.